In the final episode of the Tally Room for 2018, I’m joined by Kevin Bonham to discuss the close races in the Victorian state election, and to run through all eight Legislative Council contests just days out from the pushing of the button in each region.
You can follow Kevin’s live blog of the Legislative Council count.
I thought I would dive into some of the interesting data trends from last weekend’s Victorian state election, since fellow bloggers William Bowe and Kevin Bonham are doing a great job tracking the close races as counting continues.
Ben spoke to Paddy Manning from the Monthly and Stewart Jackson from the University of Sydney about the results of Saturday’s Victorian state election, including a focus on the Greens’ performance and preferences in the upper house.
The Legislative Council result at the moment looks like a big victory for Labor and the small parties, and a bad result for the Greens and the Coalition, but the impact of late counting and below the line votes is yet to be made clear.
6:00pm – Polls have just closed in Victoria. I won’t be updating this post regularly tonight as I have another commitment, but will occasionally post summaries. Feel free to use the comments section as an open thread to discuss the results.
If you want to follow the results can I suggest one of these options:
Voters in Victoria will be voting today in their state election – except, that is, for those who have already voted, in record numbers.
As of Thursday night, 1,184,095 early votes had been cast. This is already well ahead of 2014, when a total of 912,967 early votes were cast, and doesn’t take into account those votes cast on Friday (likely in excess of 200,000 votes). As of Wednesday night the VEC reported that early votes cast so far was 65% above the 2014 level.
I’ve done a video for my day job explaining to voters how they can vote below the line to avoid the risks of electing someone they don’t support, which could happen if they vote above the line.
In this week’s podcast Ben is joined by Tom Clement from Geeklections and Tim Colebatch.
We discussed the Victorian upper house race in depth, followed by a summary of the Victorian state election campaign.
Today is one year since the announcement of the result in the marriage law postal survey, and I have a special podcast episode focusing on that process.
I interviewed Simon Copland and Dr Liz Allen on Tuesday at a conference about the anniversary at the ANU.
The group voting tickets were released on Sunday, showing how each party will direct its preferences for votes cast above-the-line in each region for the Victorian Legislative Council.
For those still catching up, this is basically the same system used for the Senate up to 2013 (although it is easier to cast a formal below-the-line vote if you wish to opt out). The upper house consists of forty members, with five elected for each of the eight regions.